Self-Destructive Drives

As one of the most mature technology product categories, you might think that disk drives would rarely cause customers any grief. So it’s a bit surprising that more than one reader recently reports feeling a destructive urge directed at their storage device.

“I just bought a Sandisk 1 gig USB drive,” wrote one reader. “To my surprise it comes loaded with well over 100 megs of demoware, adware and crapware — all of which was set to Read Only. It immediately installed a tasktray utility called U3, which apparently is supposed to make it easier to insert and eject the USB drive. All it really did was leave a large incomplete window anchored to the lower right corner of my desktop, forcing me to reboot to get rid of it. (I have plain Jane Windows XP SP2.) In addition an autorun application was very enthusiastically trying to sell me all manner of utilities and software products, or at least, get me to install the demos. After removing the Read Only attribute, I erased the almost 120 megs of ‘preloaded’ crapware and rebooted my computer. If I hadn’t just paid real money for the drive, I would have reduced it to scrap with a hammer.”

What really drives readers batty though is lack of support for problem drives. “Have you heard any of the complaints from users regarding the Western Digital My Book World Edition II?” another reader wrote. “Western Digital says that this networkable drive is Plug-N-Play, however, I find that hard to believe. I’ve had the drive for two weeks and have only been able to get the network to recognize it once, for about two hours, then it went offline and has not been back online since then. I’ve searched the Internet and found that this is a common problem and, worse than that, the postings I’ve read plus my own experience find that Western Digital customer service has been less than helpful. In fact, daily e-mails sent for two weeks now have only gotten the auto response sent to me. I’ve talked to their customer service on the phone, but they don’t seem to want to help. I’ve finally decided to take the drive down to file recovery place and pay the enormous fee to have my files that I was able to transfer to the drive removed from it. At that time, I will smash the drive, box it with a load of dog crap and ship it off to Western Digital. Maybe at that time they’ll get the picture.”

One reader facing a similar situation with a Seagate/Maxtor drive came up with another way of dealing with it. “I bought the drive back in January as a ‘spare’ and had a need for it recently. I opened up the shrinkwrap and it was DOA — the MaxBlast software confirmed this. After hunting around for a tech support/RMA phone number I was greeted with the steady busy signal. After hours of that frustration I was able to get an RMA issued using an online tool, but I wanted a replacement drive sent ASAP and then I would send the defective HD in– but there was no means to do that. A day or two later I finally got through to a live person. I explained that I wanted a replacement sent first, she put me on hold for a while and came back and said that they do not do that for my particular drive model. I asked why — I buy a brand new HD, take off the shrink wrap as a brand new product, but now I have to pay the expense to ship it back AND wait who knows how long for the replacement? Since the 14-day return policy had already expired I was left with little recourse. I bought a new HD at Staples, the same model, and subsequently returned the defective one. I feel somewhat bad, but we consumers always seem to have all the terms dictated to us, that any way we can legally get justice is fair game in my book. I know that it is debatable, but we all pick and choose our battle of ethics.”

Which approach would you take with a destructive drive – send it back to the manufacturer in small pieces, or do whatever you have to do to get your money back? Post your comments on my website or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.

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